Blockchain-Based KYC: Content Addressable Storage and Encryption

Know Your Customer (KYC) is a crucial and mandatory stage for any financial institution post-new user registration. However, the data collected from this process are often stored in centralized or traditional systems which are not tamper-proof making sensitive user information prone to vulnerabilities and information theft. Our proposed system aims to create a KYC system using immutable property of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), i.e., Ethereum blockchain platform, smart contract, MetaMask Wallet, and the Content Addressable Storage (CAS), i.e., Interplanetary File System (IPFS). The system also integrates end-to-end encryption, i.e., AES- 256- GCM algorithm which will increase its security and improve the data integrity aspect as well. A comparison of KYC systems working with traditional storage and cryptographic methods and our proposed system to migrate this traditional infrastructure to a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) storage, access control, and state maintaining distributed virtual machine with ciphered data is done. The attributes for performance evaluation metrics are blockchain-based, access control, secure search, storage environment, encryption and decryption mechanisms. After which, a price comparison of data uploading cost on the blockchain in USD (raw data V/S encrypted data) is done which shows that our proposed system is much more economical for uploading larger files.